Game Wrappers for Mac

As we all know, Windows is still the king of Games and certainly MMO and MMORPGs. Besides majort game titles games are mostly produced natively for Windows alone. Usual comments like “buy a real computer instead of a mac” can be found across numerous forums. Don’t hang your head just yet and certainly don’t go out and buy a windows computer. There is still away around this issue with the help of wrappers. Wrappers takes a Windows app and simulates the environment it needs inside a package that the host OS can understand. In some cases a wrapper is so efficient that developers just use it, instead of creating dedicated ports. However, in some cases the quality is not the same. That is why Bootcamp is still a popular option.

Game Wrappers for Mac

Game Wrapper Software for Mac

Cider

TransGaming Technologies has developed a product called Cider which is a popular method among publishers to port games to Mac. Cider’s engine enables publishers and developers to target Mac OS X. It shares much of the same core technology as TransGaming’s Linux Portability Engine, Cedega. Public reception of games ported with Cider is mixed, due to inconsistency of performance between titles; because of this, “Ciderized” games are neither seen as the work of cross-platform development, nor as native, optimized ports. Both Cider and Cedega are based on Wine. Electronic Arts announced their return to the Mac, publishing various titles simultaneously on both Windows and Mac, using Cider.

Wine

An open source Wine-based project called Wineskin allows anyone to attempt to port games to Mac OS X[18] since 2010. It uses all open source components and is open source itself. Its technology is very similar to what TransGaming does with Cider, but it is free to use to anyone. Wineskin creates self-contained (“clickable”) Mac Applications out of the installation. The “wrappers” that can be made from this are often shared with friends or others. Legal versions of games can then be installed easily into the shared wrapper and then the final result works like a normal Mac app. Wineskin is mainly only used in “Hobbyist Porting” and not professional porting, but some professional game companies have used it in major releases. Since the end of 2014, there is a PaulTheTall.com app called Porting Kit which automatically creates ready-to-use Wineskin wrappers for some specific games.

CrossOver

CodeWeavers CrossOver products use a compatibility layer to translate Windows application instructions to the native Macintosh operating system, without the need to run Windows. CrossOver is built from the Wine project and adds a graphical frontend to the process of installing and running the Windows applications through Wine. CodeWeavers is an active supporter of Wine and routinely shares programming code and patches back to the project.

PlayOnMac

PlayOnMac is a free version of the same technology, also based on Wine.

MMOMAC.

We have delivered the latest Massive Multiplayer Online gaming news and information for Macintosh users since 2008. Our goal is to build the biggest library of MMO, MMOFPS, MMORPG, MMORTS, MOBA and Multiplayer Games for Mac.